historians; the rise of true
history brought the same result as the rise of true philosophy. In this
instance there was added a special circumstance which gave to the
movement no little force. Whatever might be the feigned facts of the
Grecian foretime, they were altogether outdone in antiquity and wonder
by the actual history of Egypt. What was a pious man like Herodotus to
think when he found that, at the very period he had supposed a
superhuman state of things in his native country, the ordinary passage
of affairs was taking place on the banks of the Nile? And so indeed it
had been for untold ages. To every one engaged in recording recent
events, it must have been obvious that a chronology applied where the
actors are superhuman is altogether without basis, and that it is a
delusion to transfer the motives and thoughts of men to those who are
not men. Under such circumstances there is a strong inducement to
decline traditions altogether; for no philosophical mind will ever be
satisfied with different tests for the present and the past, but will
insist that actions and their sequences were the same in the foretime as
now.

[Sidenote: Universal disbelief of the learned.]

Thus for many ages stood affairs. One after another, historians,
philosophers, critics, poets, had given up the national faith, and lived
under a pressure perpetually laid upon them by the public, adopting
generally, as their most convenient course, an outward compliance with
the religious requirements of the state. Herodotus cannot reconcile the
inconsistencies of the Trojan War with his knowledge of human actions;
Thucydides does not dare to express his disbelief of it; Eratosthenes
sees contradictions between the voyage of Odysseus and the truths of
geography; Anaxagoras is condemned to death for impiety, and only
through the exertions of the chief of the state is his sentence
mercifully commuted to banishment. Plato, seeing things from a very
general point of view, thinks it expedient, upon the whole, to prohibit
the cultivation of the higher branches of physics. Euripides tries to
free himself from the imputation of heresy as best he may. Aeschylus is
condemned to be stoned to death for blasphemy, and is only saved by his
brother Aminias raising his mutilated arm--he had lost his hand in the
battle of Salamis. Socrates stands his trial, and has to drink hemlock.
Even great statesmen like Pericles had become entangled in the obnoxious
opinions.